Carpe Diem
Cornwell, Autumn
Hardcover
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BOOK SUMMARY
In this delightful romantic adventure, a 16-year-old overachiever learns how to seize the day.
BOOK SYNOPSIS
Ive got my entire life planned out for the next ten years including my PhD and Pulitzer Prize, claims 16-year-old overachiever Vassar Spore, daughter of overachiever parents, who in true overachiever fashion named her after an elite womens college. Vassar expects her sophomore summer to include AP and AAP (Advanced Advanced Placement) classes. Surprise! Enter a world-traveling relative who sends her plans into a tailspin when she blackmails Vassars parents into forcing their only child to backpack with her through Southeast Asia.
On a journey from Malaysia to Cambodia to the remote jungles of Laos, Vassar sweats, falls in love, hones her outdoor survival skills and uncovers a family secret that turns her whole world upside-down.
Vassar Spore can plan on one thing: shell never be the same again.
AUTHOR BIO
Squat toilets, profuse sweating, bamboo huts, jumbo centipedes these are just some of the delights AUTUMN CORNWELL has encountered in her global travels. Not to mention the cant-believe-its-true Laotian jungle adventure which inspired Carpe Diem.
A travel junkie, Autumn has explored 22 countries and counting. Shes spent the last couple summers working with refugees and orphans in Burma, Thailand, and Laos. Southeast Asia remains close to her heart since her days as a missionary kid in New Papua where she ate her weight in guavas and mingled with reformed headhunters and cannibals. Which was nothing compared to navigating the intrepid jungles of the TV & Film Industry, where she spent most of her career.
Autumn lives in Los Feliz, a neighborhood in Los Angeles, with her husband JC, and their son Dexter. This is her first novel.
BOOK EXCERPTS
You Can Plan Your Life
The package came during the Hour of Reflection, that sacred time after dinner when we peruse goals accomplished during the day and set goals for the day to come. (If it worked for Benjamin Franklin, it can work for us, as Mom would say.)
We were sitting in our living room, my favorite room in the house, with its stone fireplace and floor-to-ceiling booksall in Dewey decimal system order. And no TVbecause thats living vicariously through other people. Dad was editing the proofs of his latest book, How to Increase Your Personal Productivity in 2,000 Easy Steps; Mom was writing in her Journal of Excellence; and I was tackling my Life Goals. This what I had so far:
Vassar Spores Life Goals
Graduate valedictorian from Seattle Academy of Academic Excellence (with a minimum of 5.3 GPA). Graduate with honors from Vassar (and receive an honorary certificate because of the whole same name thing) then get PhD in (TBD) from an Ivy League school (TBD). Marry a 65 blond surgeon (or judge) for love by age 25; have three children by age 35 (two girls, one boy). Publish the definitive book on (TBD) by age 37. Receive Pulitzer prize.
BOOK REVIEWS
A naïve teen learns how to carpe diem after spending an adventurous summer in Southeast Asia. Sixteen-year-old Vassar Spore attends a private school where she’s prepping to be valedictorian, attend Vassar College, marry a surgeon or judge, write a book and win a Pulitzer by age 37. Her life has been carefully scripted by her efficiency-expert father and life-coach mother. But Vassar’s hygienically sealed world capsizes when her parents reluctantly let her spend the summer backpacking through Malaysia, Cambodia and Laos with her bohemian Grandma Gerd. Suspecting that Grandma has blackmailed her parents, Vassar is determined to discover their “Big Secret.” A novice traveler, Vassar arrives in Melaka with ten pieces of matched luggage, her laptop on which she plans to convert her experiences into a novel for Advanced Placement credit, her Genteel Traveler’s Guides and her Portable Travel Planner. Appalled by Grandma Gerd’s “live in the moment” philosophy, Vassar gradually jettisons her obsessive-compulsive behavior and emerges knowing who she really is and what she really wants as she travels from the temples of Angkor to the bamboo huts of Laos. A witty coming-of-age adventure. (Fiction. 12-17)
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MORE BOOK INFO
ISBN: 0312367929
ISBN(13-digit): 9780312367923
Dewey Decimal: [Fic]
Library of Congress: 2006032054
Book Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Language: ENG
No. of Pages: 360
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